Stephen King - Revival

There was another flash of lightning, and from the mahogany box, a poisonous greenish-purple wink of light shot through a gap in the latch, there at one second, gone the next.

“If it’s any comfort to you, Miss Fay agreed to this experiment. The paperwork is in apple-pie order, including a signed affidavit giving me power to cease so-called heroic measures at my own discretion. In return for my brief and entirely respectful use of her remains, Mary’s son will be taken care of with a generous trust fund that will see him well into adulthood. There are no victims here, Jamie.”

So you say , I thought. So you say .

Thunder roared. This time, just before the stroke of lightning, I heard a faint clicking sound. Jacobs did, too.

“The time has arrived. Come into the room with me or go away.”

“I’ll come,” I said. “And I’ll be praying nothing happens. Because this isn’t an experiment, Charlie. This is hell’s work.”

“Think what you want and pray all you like. Maybe you’ll have better luck than I ever did… although I really doubt it.”

He opened the door, and I followed him into the room where Mary Fay had died.

There was a large east-facing windowin Mary Fay’s death chamber, but the storm was almost fully upon us now, and all I saw through it was a tarnished silver curtain of rain. The room was a nest of shadows in spite of the table lamp. My left shoulder brushed the bureau Jacobs had mentioned, but I never thought of the revolver in the top drawer. All my attention was taken up by the still figure lying in the hospital bed. I had a clear view, because the various monitors had been turned off and the IV pole had been pushed into the corner.

She was beautiful. Death had erased any marks incised by the disease that had infested her brain, and her upturned face—alabaster skin set off by luxuriant masses of dark chestnut hair—was as perfect as any cameo. Her eyes were shut. Thick lashes lay against her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted. A sheet was pulled up to her shoulders. Her clasped hands lay on it, above the swell of her bosom. A snatch of poetry, something from twelfth-grade English, came to mind and chimed there: Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face… How statue-like I see thee …

Jenny Knowlton stood beside the now useless ventilator, wringing her hands.

Lightning flashed. In its momentary glare I saw the iron pole on Skytop, standing as it had for God knew how many years, challenging each storm to do its worst.

Jacobs was holding out the box. “Help me, Jamie. We must be swift. Take it and open it. I’ll do the rest.”

“Don’t,” Jenny said from her corner. “For the love of God, let her rest in peace.”

Jacobs might not have heard her over the drumming rain and screaming wind. I did, but chose to ignore her. This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know—by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there’s still time.

I opened the box. There were no rods inside, and no control box. What had taken their place was a metallic headband, as thin as the strap on a young girl’s dress shoe. Jacobs took it out carefully—reverently—and gently pulled it. I saw it stretch. And when the next stroke of lightning came, once more preceded by that faint clicking sound, I saw green radiance dance across it, making it look like something other than dead metal. A snake, maybe.

Jacobs said, “Miss Knowlton, lift her head for me.”

She shook her head so hard her hair flew.

He sighed. “Jamie. You do it.”

I moved to the bed like a man in a dream. I thought of Patricia Farmingdale pouring salt in her eyes. Of Emil Klein eating dirt. Of Hugh Yates watching as the faithful in Pastor Danny’s revival tent were replaced by huge ants. I thought, Every cure has its price .

There was another click , followed by another flash of lightning. Thunder roared, shaking the house. The bedside lamp went out. For a moment the room was plunged into shadows, and then a generator clattered to life.

“Quickly!” Jacobs’s voice was pained. I saw burns across both of his palms. But he hadn’t dropped the headband. It was his last conductor, his conduit to potestas magnum universum , and I believed then (and now) that not even death by electrocution would have made him drop it. “Quickly, before lightning strikes the pole!”

I lifted Mary Fay’s head. Her chestnut hair fell away from that perfect (and perfectly still) face in a dark flood that pooled on the pillow. Charlie was beside me, bending down and breathing in harsh, excited gasps. His exhalations stank of age and infirmity. It occurred to me that he could have waited a few months and investigated what lay on the other side of the door personally. But that, of course, wasn’t what he wanted. At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. Did he want to know what lay beyond death’s door? Yes. But what he wanted more—I believe this with all my heart—was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?

“Her hair… lift her hair.” He turned accusingly to the woman cowering in the corner. “Damn you, I said to cut it!”

Jenny made no reply.

I lifted Mary Fay’s hair. It was as soft and heavy as a bolt of silk, and I knew why Jenny hadn’t cut it. She couldn’t bear to.

Jacobs slipped the thin band of metal over her forehead, so it lay tight against the hollows of her temples.

“All right,” he said, straightening up.

I laid the dead woman’s head gently back on the pillow, and as I looked at those dark lashes brushing against her cheeks, a comforting thought came to me: It wouldn’t work. Cures were one thing; reviving a woman who had been dead for fifteen minutes—no, closer to half an hour now—was another. It simply wasn’t possible. And if a stroke of lightning packing millions of volts did do something—if it caused her to twitch her fingers or turn her head—it would be no more meaningful than the jerk of a dead frog’s leg when electricity from a dry cell is applied. What could he hope to accomplish? Even if her brain had been perfectly healthy, it would now be decaying in her skull. Brain death is irrevocable; even I knew that.

I stepped back. “Now what, Charlie?”

“We wait,” he said. “It won’t be long.”

When the bedside lamp went outa second time, thirty seconds or so later, it didn’t come back on, and I could no longer hear the roar of the gennie below the roar of the wind. Now that he had slipped the metal band around Mary Fay’s head, Jacobs seemed to have lost interest in her. He was staring out the window, hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain on the bridge. The iron pole wasn’t visible through the teeming rain—not even as a shadow—but we’d see it when the lightning struck it. If the lightning struck it. So far, it hadn’t. Perhaps there was a God, I thought, and He’d taken sides against Charles Jacobs.

“Where’s the control box?” I asked him. “Where’s the connection to that pole out there?”

He looked at me as if I were an imbecile. “There’s no way to control the power that lies beyond the lightning. It would fry even a titanium box to a cinder. As for the connection… it’s you , Jamie. Haven’t you guessed even yet why you’re here? Did you think I brought you to cook my meals ?”